'Ryan's Hope' Star Kate Mulgrew Talks About Baby She Gave Up For Adoption on 'CBS Sunday Morning' (Video)

Kate Mulgrew was catapulted overnight to stardom on Ryan's Hope in 1975.

"Whole gaggles of girls would stop me on the streets of New York, 'Mary Ryan! Mary Ryan!' I remember that. It was big," Mulgrew revealed on CBS Sunday Morning earlier today.

That first season she was on top of the world. And then, she got pregnant. The father was an assistant director. Marriage was out of the question.

"He's a good, good guy. We were just too young," she said.

They broke up on a bench outside Central Park: "And he looked at me and, not unkindly, said, 'I wish I'd never met you.'"

At her mother's urging she went to Catholic Charities and agreed to put the unborn baby up for adoption, while the producers of Ryan's Hope wrote her pregnancy into the plot line.

"Six million people watched me have this baby," said Mulgrew. "And I had the baby. And I gave the baby up and went back to work two days later."

In 1999 she was contacted by an agency that connects adopted children with their birth parents. Mulgrew was in her trailer on the set of Star Trek: Voyager at 5 a.m.: "The phone rang. 'Hello? 'Hello?' 'Hi. This is Danielle Gaudette. And I think I am your birth daughter.'"